Master Levels for Doom II

If you were the type to draw fanciful Doom scenes all over your schoolbooks, rejoice! Thanks to the mod Brutal Doom, id's shooter is now every bit as violent as your younger self's doodles. Every dismemberment; every curbstomping; every immolation; every Hell Knight being kicked square in the soul spheres: they're all here. A new version came out last week, letting me post a long-overdue story about this gory marvel.

Brutal Doom, as the name suggests, makes Doom and Doom 2 more violent. Blood sprays across walls, gibs fly freely, you can blow enemies' legs off to make them crawl then curbstomp them, the Beserk powerup adds horrifying fatalities, more weapons are in, and it's generally, well, brutal. Now moreso, since creator 'Sergeant_Mark_IV' released version 18 on Valentine's Day.

It's the season of heavy holiday hitters for the games industry, but if you're more of a classic connoisseur you might prefer strolls down memory lane. To that end, a "Doom Classic Complete" set is hitting the PlayStation Network today, and it packs three of the hell-heavy titles together.

As detailed on the BethBlog, the set will cost $14.99 and will include Doom (with "Thy Flesh Consumed"), Doom 2 (with "No Rest for the Living" and "The Master Levels"), and Final Doom.

Since Bethesda Softworks bought id Software, the publisher has been keen on making use of its old franchises. This will be the second Doom in just over a month, after the recent release of Doom 3 BFG Edition.

Ah, FPSs! They don't make them like they used to, do they? No, in many ways and for a number of reasons. But if you find yourself nostalgically longing for The Good Old Days and sniping at the likes of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, then have I got the Doom 2 parody mod for you!

Released on the same day as Cod Blops 2, Call of Dooty II: Green Ops crams waypoint markers, regenerating health, cutscenes, flashbacks, nonsense conspiracies about Russians, popup hints, and other foolishness into id Software's classic FPS.

"Let's face it: Shooters today suck. Their levels are too linear, they aren't challenging enough, and they play more like interactive movies than the experiences we once loved up until the mid-2000s," creator 'Chubzdoomer' says in the readme file. "Call of Dooty is an ode to the terrible shooters that now inhabit the market and have taken over the gaming industry by storm. This WAD isn't supposed to be fun to play - it's here to make a statement."

Call of Dooty II is fittingly the sequel to last year's Call of Dooty, which was itself inspired by kmoosmann's 'If Quake was done today.' Annual sequels to mods parodying games suffering annual sequelitis, how glorious!

Of course, this being a modern linear FPS, multiple editions are a must. There's a plain old Standard Edition for proles, a Limited Edition with the original Call of Dooty and some before/after screenshots, and a Special Edition which also adds the soundtrack, ringtones, and achievement icons. Any true Call of Dooty fan will want the Collector's Edition, which packs all that plus the papercraft marine, 'making of' document, and the Green Ops Armor DLC. It's a small touch which means so much.